Twitter data acquisition and analysis: Methodology and best practice

Social media data collection is often treated as tacit knowledge with the collation of tweets reduced to a single sentence without explanation as to means, mechanisms or relative merit of the approach. This chapter describes methods and techniques for the capture of Twitter timeline data, inclusive of first person and third party methods for data capture from personal accounts, public accounts, and keyword searches. The chapter takes a practical approach to acquiring Twitter data with a focus on individual timelines, and small to medium scale search sets. The emphasis is on being able to obtain, examine, and convert Twitter data into knowledge quickly, and with limited requirement for technical skills. This type of data collection assumes no prior programming knowledge. The chapter explains how to retrieve Twitter data from three sources: personally controlled timelines, third party timelines and ongoing search results. Finally, the chapter describes preliminary analysis that can be performed to ascertain content creation patterns, without recourse to analysis of individual tweets.